Iâve seen worse Paranormal Activity movies than The Ghost Dimension, and thatâs sad.Â
What began as a simple, almost primal spook story about a couple haunted â literally and figuratively â by their demons has evolved over the years into a pointlessly complicated mythology that progressively ruins everything that once made the original movie great. When The Marked Ones finally revealed that the unthinkable off-screen nightmare at the end of the first movie was, in fact, just a hispanic teenager who wandered into the wrong house, the terror was all but dead.
All that we have left is the most superficially scary part of the Paranormal Activity series: The Startles. You know The Startles. Theyâre the camera angles that linger on seemingly banal scenes of families doing nothing particular and then WHAT WAS THAT OH GOD WHAT WAS THAT OH NO aaaaaaand itâs gone. By now the Paranormal Activity series has reduced The Startles to a mathematical formula so basic that you can predict every single one of them. Nothing under the bed, nothing behind you, nothing outside the window, now say âThereâs nothing thereâ and then oh-no-what-is-that-horrible-thing, âAaagh.â
The plot is just that thereâs a new family plagued by the supernatural entity we now know as âToby.â A little girl is speaking to Toby, and thatâs creepy, etc. Meanwhile, her father has found a sci-fi video camera that captures images of ghosts on screen. He also finds leftover footage from the last good Paranormal Activity movie, Paranormal Activity 3, and he watches a lot of that. Would that we could simply join him.
As the haunting escalates, and we finally see that Toby has just been an unconvincing blotch of CGI sludge this whole time, we wonder why weâre supposed to give damn. Because if youâll recall, somewhere out there is an evil coven of witches breeding super soldiers and nobody ever thought to resolve that subplot in the last film. So itâs kind of hard to focus on this bland new family with lame, familiar problems. Even the filmâs conclusion, which kinda-sorta brings the story to an end, comes up short through a shocking lack of imagination, and a dedication to this now comically elaborate mythology that makes everything happening throughout this series seem retroactively silly, instead of frightening.
Paranormal Activity: The Ghost Dimension is the sort of scary thatâs only fun in a crowded room, where the law of averages demands that at least one or two people arenât horror movie junkies and will jump at just about anything. You wonât scream at the events transpiring on screen, youâll scream because someone behind you screamed, and youâre surprised because honestly, there was nothing to scream about. At all.
Photos: Paramount
William Bibbiani (everyone calls him âBibbsâ) is Craveâs film content editor and critic. You can hear him every week on The B-Movies Podcast and watch him on the weekly YouTube series Most Craved and What the Flick. Follow his rantings on Twitter at @WilliamBibbiani.